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Man Guilty of Extortion in O'Hair Case

From a headless, handless corpse on a muddy riverbank to $500,000 in stolen gold and to a stream of receipts from fancy hotels, federal prosecutors here used an ineluctable chain of circumstantial evidence to convict a sometime handyman on charges relating to the disappearance of the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair, her son and granddaughter.

The handyman, Gary Paul Karr, 52, of Novi, Mich., was found guilty today in federal district court here of conspiracy to commit extortion, traveling interstate to commit violent acts, money laundering and interstate transportation of stolen property. He now faces mandatory life in prison without parole.

He was acquitted of conspiracy to commit kidnapping.

The verdict came nearly five years after Ms. O'Hair disappeared in 1995 along with her son Jon Garth Murray and her granddaughter, Robin Murray O'Hair.

Ms. O'Hair, 76, drew national attention when she made a legal challenge that led that to a 1963 Supreme Court ruling that effectively banned prayer in public schools.

Mr. Karr's lawyer, Tom Mills, said he was disappointed with the verdict, particularly because the jury found his client not guilty of kidnapping.

''That was the basis of their whole case,'' Mr. Mills said. ''It seems to undermine their whole theory. We have no kidnapping and no murder, and yet he's still facing a life sentence for these crimes.''

During the three-week trial, prosecutors built a mountain of circumstantial evidence against Mr. Karr, who has three prior felony convictions. Using 66 witnesses and 325 exhibits that included credit card receipts and telephone bills, prosecutors linked him with two other men suspected of killing the O'Hairs and robbing them of $500,000 in gold coins.

The authorities charged that Mr. Karr and two friends, Danny Fry and David Roland Waters, kidnapped Ms. O'Hair and her family in late September 1995, extorted money from them over a monthlong period while holding them captive in San Antonio, then killed and dismembered them at an Austin storage locker.

In the trial, prosecutors said they believed that Mr. Karr and Mr. Waters later killed Mr. Fry, cut off his head and hands and left his body on the banks of the Trinity River near Dallas in October 1995.

The federal authorities are still debating whether to try Mr. Karr and Mr. Waters for murder in the death of Mr. Fry. Prosecutors have said they may try to strike a deal with Mr. Karr to gain his testimony against Mr. Waters.

Throughout the trial, Mr. Karr's lawyers insisted that the government had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. They contended that Ms. O'Hair had been planning for some time to flee the country to avoid a battle with the Internal Revenue Service.

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The defense called only four witnesses, including the Rev. William Gordon, a Baptist minister from Georgia, who testified last week that he saw Ms. O'Hair eating pasta in a restaurant in Romania in 1997. But Mr. Gordon could not definitively say the woman he saw was Ms. O'Hair.

Prosecutors countered with Ms. O'Hair's tax lawyer, Craig Etter, who told the court that Ms. O'Hair's tax problems had largely been worked out by the time of her disappearance and that fleeing the country would have been out of character for the outspoken atheist.

Although it was Mr. Karr who was on trial, much of the testimony focused on Mr. Waters, a former office manager for Ms. O'Hair's American Atheist organization, whom the authorities believe masterminded the plot. Mr. Waters was convicted of stealing $54,400 from the group in 1994 and is serving a prison term.

Evidence introduced by the prosecution showed that the O'Hairs had used $90,000 in credit cards and liquidated bank accounts and that Mr. Murray bought at least $500,000 in gold coins the month before the O'Hairs disappeared.

In the weeks after the disappearance, Mr. Waters and Mr. Karr went on a spending spree, prosecutors said, spending thousands of dollars on motorcycles, computers and expensive hotels and restaurants.

Investigators for the Internal Revenue Service began looking into the case in 1996 after The San Antonio Express-News reported that officials of the American Atheist organization filed forms with the I.R.S., reporting that the group was missing $610,000 and that they believed Mr. Murray had the money.

One juror, Jeff Sloan, 43, said the prosecutors presented a compelling case for all of the charges against Mr. Karr, but they could not agree on the kidnapping charge.

''We didn't necessarily say there was no kidnapping,'' Mr. Sloan said as he left the courthouse. ''It was something we didn't decide.''

Mr. Sloan said the jury could not agree on the intent element in the kidnapping charge. Asked what he thought about the fate of the O'Hairs, Mr. Sloan, who works for a computer company in Austin, said he believed they were dead.

The jurors, eight men and four women, deliberated for more than 32 hours over four days before reaching their verdict.